Sunday, June 29, 2014

For the 2014 Nobelesse Largesse exchange, I received one of the past Escutcheon Heralds of the Midrealm as my recipient. So I decided to do something heraldic -- a roll of arms of all Escutcheons. This involved some covert research via mk-heralds, to make sure that I had all of them in my list; I was surprised that there have been only 10 so far! That makes for a nice 3 x 4 grid, with two left over. At first I was going to do 4 x 3, but then when I started sketching out the escutcheons, on Jun. 20, I realized they'd fit better in the other orientation. Over the course of the evening, I sketched all the escutcheons, inked them in, and began the interior designs. By the end of the night, I'd completely inked in those of Angharad, Ana, Brynniulfr, Estelle, and Calybrid; the remaining ones were at least partially pencilled in but I knew I need more time to do the chevronelly, the compass stars, the lion, the crossbow, etc.

I did all the calligraphy the morning of Jun. 21, while Gwen happily played behind me. I had just started the painting when I realized...I drew one of the arms wrong. And I don't know of any way to fix it. ARG.

On Jun. 22, I decided it was at least worth trying to scrape and paint over the error; I only got as far as the scraping though, and didn't have the heart to go any further. The next evening, optimistic enough that the fix could work, I pulled out the paints again, but this time stuck to azure, doing the fields for Angharad's, Ana's, and Estelle's arms. On the evening of Jun. 24, I finished inking in the corrected arms, and wetted up the green paint to do the field on Paul's, Estelle's, and Brynniulfr's. On Jun. 25, I completed drawing and inking in the remainder of the arms. Only thing left to do is paint!

Painting began in earnest the next night, which was SCA night at our place, when I finished up everything except for the white. Which means that when I picked up brush Jun. 29, I was able to finish everything!

Monday, June 9, 2014

I began the illumination at Arts in April, during my intro to illumination class; I had the border printed out, and it seemed nice and simple, and a good way to illustrate various techniques. I continued using it for the same purpose for my intro to illumination class at Double Wars. Then a few days later, Margaretha came over for C&I night and was looking for advice on gilding, so I took the opportunity to put down all the size and then, rather than deal with gold that night, painted in all the black outlining. It started turning out really nice, so I decided then to use it for Thomas's Lindquistringes, rather than trying to start a completely new design from scratch in the remaining time I had left. So two nights later, Jun. 1, I returned and did all the gilding -- or at least, I put gold over all the size, and left the matter of cleaning up the edges and removing the extra bits for another night. That other night was Jun. 5, when I discovered a nifty trick of running my finger very lightly over all the gilded parts, which did remarkably well of cleaning up the edges and removing the extra bits. Then I went in to painting the inside of the initial, which I had previously forgotten to sketch when I was sketching everything else. I managed to get that, and a little bit of the whitework done before needed to turn my attention to other things.

I put down the size for gilding the inner part of the initial the evening of Jun. 6, and during Gwen's nap on Jun. 8, I gilding that, finished, the whitework, and re-went over all the outlines in black. Only thing left, now, writing the text and doing the calligraphy!

Joel offered to watch Gwen some on Jun. 9, which allowed me to get the lines ruled out and the text written. The text reads:

It took just under two hours to do all the calligraphy, along with all the internal capitals and flourishes, interrupted only three times by a small child who recognize the power of the toilet as a "get out of bed free" card. The internal decorated initials are drawn from BL MS Egerton 751 f. 13v.

And I was just about ready to wrap up shop for the night...and realized I'd forgotten to put the green bits around the golden balls. Out come the paints and brushes again... V. pleased with the result; the green made the border pop, quite a bit more than I would've thought on the basis of my exemplar.